STILL THE GREATEST

I once met Muhammad Ali. He had come to Oxford to sign copies of a book by his friend Howard Bingham. It was 1993, more than ten years since his last fight, almost 30 since he had first won the world title. Ali moved slowly, and spoke only in a whisper. His dark, empty eyes were depressing evidence of his losing battle against Parkinson’s Disease. But despite all this, the queue to see him stretched for several blocks. Hundreds of people, young and old, waited patiently to be ushered into his presence. After all, this was Muhammad Ali.

I’m A Little Special – A Muhammad Ali Reader gathers together the best writing on Ali from the ’60s to the present. Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and George Plimpton are among those who pay homage to the man who will be forever known as The Greatest.

In his introduction, Gerard Early refers to Ali’s “dragon-slaying heroics.” It is almost impossible to tell his story without using the lexicon of fairytales. Aged 22, Cassius Clay, as he then was, challenged Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world. Liston was considered unbeatable: Cassius defeated him in six rounds. The following morning, he renounced his “slave name” and made public his affiliation with the Black Muslim movement.

Three years later, Ali refused to be drafted into the US Army in Vietnam. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he famously remarked. His title was stripped from him, his license to box revoked. But the Ali legend grew. He became a focal point for black rights campaigners, for anti-war sentiment, for the disenfranchised everywhere. Muhammad Ali became the unoffficial president of Black America.

The ban robbed Ali of three-and-a-half years of his career. After some inauspicious comeback fights, he announced in 1974 that he would meet George Foreman, the undisputed champion, in Zaire. Ali was by now 32, six years older than his opponent. Such was Foreman’s power that one of his punches to the stomach would have broken a normal man’s spine. As with Liston a decade earlier, Ali was thought to have no chance. Showing breathtaking bravery, he knocked Foreman out in the eighth round. “I told you! I told you!“ he crowed.

No sportsman has ever engaged the emotions of the public like Ali. It is unlikely that anyone ever will. He had courage and athleticism and grace and panache. He had everything. To Norman Mailer, “it was as if a man with the exquisite reflexes of Nureyev had learned to throw a knockout punch with either hand.” To Pete Hamill he was “a fighter who made a brutal sport contain the illusion of beauty.”

The decline from such lofty heights has been heart-rending. Mark Kram describes the former champion dozing off in the middle of a meal, unable to remember where he is. David Maraniss, writing in 1997, comments, “the world sees him now, lurching a bit, slurring some, getting old, and recalls that unspeakably great and gorgeous and garrulous young man that he once was.”

In 1975 Ali was asked how he would be remembered:

“I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered,” he answered. “As a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humourous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him, and who helped as many of his people as he could in their fight for freedom, justice and equality. As a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people . . . And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”

The Greatest. Of All Time. Just like he always said.

• I’m A Little Special – A Muhammad Ali Reader. Ed. Gerard Early. Yellow Jersey Press £18.40.

• Niall Stanage

Our thanks to Waterstone’s Bookshop for their assistance